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This article offers a new interpretation of the historical relation between two foundational works in cultural history: Johan Huizinga's 'The Autumntide of the Middle Ages' (1919) and Jacob Burckhardt's 'The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy' (1860). The tension between these works has commonly been understood as a scholarly dispute over the proper historical periodization of European fifteenth-century cultural practices: whilst Burckhardt reconstructed his material in terms of its technical novelty, its ability to 'create' (schöpfen) a post-medieval world, Huizinga emphasized how fifteenth-century culture continued to 're-create' (her-scheppen) culture according to medieval symbolic codes. The present article suggests understanding this tension not as a product of a trans-historical scholarly dispute over the character of a given period of time, but as a consequence of Huizinga's experience of loss and nostalgia, his 'heimwee' for past times. Between 1903 and 1905, Huizinga witnessed a large-scale destruction of early-seventeenth-century architecture in Amsterdam so as to make way for 'the spirit of entrepreneurship,' and it was first in this context that Huizinga grew interested in the importance of historical recreations to European culture. This article shows how Huizinga's experience of urban modernization and 'the inhabited ruin' mediated his critique of Burckhardt's book on Renaissance Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Portrait of Mr W. H." was published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1889 and a second "version," as it is often termed, was written at various points between then and 1893, but it did not appear until 1921 and then only in a limited edition. This second text, first tentatively titled The Incomparable and ingenious history of Mr W. H. and here called the Rosenbach manuscript, is twice the length of the earlier piece, and in its tone, tenor, and range of reference very different. This article argues why it is important to distinguish carefully between Blackwood's "Mr W. H" and the Rosenbach manuscript. There is much to learn about Wilde's compositional practices and developing interest in doing so. [120 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), author of the historical-cultural synthesis found in the book of 1860, The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, elaborates, in the 1880s and 1890s, a study on Italian Renaissance painting, whose result is a set of texts, published posthumously. Part of this project, the volume on portrait in the painting presents a renewed look of the author about Venetian art compared to the vision of Venice presented in the book of 1860. This article proposes an analysis of the place occupied by portrait in Venetian painting and its role in Burckhardt's work on the Italian Renaissance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his seminal 1962 essay,The Shape of Time, the American art historian George Kubler described the production of art as a series of attempts to ‘solve’ a certain artistic ‘problem’. The origin of these ‘problems’ is located in epochal artworks that are called ‘prime objects’ by Kubler. This essay situates this explanation for artistic innovation in the tradition of art historiography, most notably Jacob Burckhardt whose writings bear striking similarities to Kubler’s concepts and might have even inspired the neologism ‘prime object’. However, I argue that Kubler’s notion of the problem-posing ‘prime object’ virtually inverts the meaning of the term as employed by his predecessor and turns it – contrary to his own claim to write a ‘history of things’ – into a concept that has in some respects more affinities with a neo-Romantic Platonism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks at the role of the ‘historical crisis’ in Jacob Burckhardt’s theory of history. By examining how Burckhardt praised the ‘crisis’ for the ways in which it could accelerate historical processes, the paper challenges interpretations of his work that focus exclusively on its synchronic elements. It also examines the relationship of his theories of the crisis to his views on warfare and on how large-scale wars could serve to speed up historical development. Ultimately, this paper seeks to challenge the easy categorization of Burckhardt as either a conservative or a liberal thinker by suggesting that his work channelled the rhetoric of both his radical and his reactionary intellectual contemporaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]